Drake is the latest musician to be hit by a flying object while performing, but it's nothing new. Here are 5 rock stars from the '80s and '90s who have been hit by wild items onstage.
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- Drake was hit by a phone thrown onstage on the opening night of his "It's All A Blur" tour.
- While this follows a string of incidents involving bad audience behavior, the phenomenon is nothing new.
- Rock stars from the '80s and '90s, like Ozzy Osbourne and David Bowie, have had pretty bad experiences too.
It's tough being a celebrity. From underwear to flowers and even cellphones, die-hard concert-goers have been tossing all kinds of things at their favorite stars onstage.
Last month, there was Bebe Rexha, who needed stitches after a phone tossed by an audience member hit her in the head. A week later, country singer Kelsea Ballerini left the stage temporarily after being struck by a flying bracelet.
Drake's the latest victim to be hit by a projectile launched onstage by an over-eager fan: Someone tossed a phone at him on the opening night of his "It's All a Blur" tour on Wednesday, according to a TikTok video circulating online.
But this phenomenon isn't new. Here are five rockstars from the '80s and the '90s who have been hit by strange and dangerous things thrown onstage.
Liam Gallagher from the British rock band Oasis was once struck by a flying shoe while performing on stage.
Paul Bergen/Redferns
Liam's brother Noel recounted the incident on BBC's Reel Stories in 2019.
"Liam had the shoe, and I remember we'd come off stage, just waiting at the front door for this guy to walk past with one shoe," Noel told BBC. "We were going to annihilate him."
The incident was typical of concert violence that often occurred during the band's tours in the '90s.
Steve Allen, a former security detail for the band who is now a crowd safety consultant, told The Guardian in August 2022 that he had "stopped 17 to 25 different shows around the world" when Oasis fans got too riled up during the concerts.
Sebastian Bach, the lead singer of heavy metal band Skid Row, was hit by a glass bottle while opening for Aerosmith in 1989.
Paul Natkin/Getty Images
Appearing furious, the singer threw the bottle back and launched himself into the crowd, video footage shows.
Bach was later arrested for assault because the bottle hit the wrong person, the Connecticut newspaper Hartford Courant reported in December 1999.
In the end, he paid a large cash settlement in the "half-a-million-dollar range" and that "wiped" him out, Bach told Hartford Courant.
"I just want to say I'm very, very sorry for what happened. It was a stupid thing to do. It was a horrible incident," Bach said.
During a performance in Norway in 2004, a fan threw a half-sucked lollipop at David Bowie, which struck him in his — thankfully — already-bad eye.
Ebet Roberts/Redferns
Bowie was performing at the Norwegian Wood Festival in Oslo when the incident happened.
According to the Norwegian publication Dagbladet, the stick end of the lollipop got stuck between his eye and his eyelid.
A fellow concert-goer caught the incident in a series of photographs, which are still circulating online in a compilation video. The photos show — very clearly — the lollipop lodged in the star's left eye and a staff member rushing onstage to help him get it out.
"Yeah, let's do that again all-fucking-right," Bowie said in the unconfirmed audio track from the compilation video. "Where are you, creep? Yeah, I guess it's easier to get lost in the crowd, you bastard."
Smash Mouth's lead singer Steve Harwell had a meltdown and had to be subdued by security after he was angered by crowd members hurling bread onstage.
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The band was performing in Colorado during Taste of Fort Collins, a food and music festival, in 2015 when the incident happened, per USA Today.
Harwell shouted profanities at the crowd and was subdued by a guard before he finally walked offstage before the encore.
"You throw one more piece on the fucking stage, I'm going to come find your ass, I'm going to come beat your ass, wherever the fuck you are ok?" Harwell can be heard saying to the crowd in a video of the incident that was uploaded to Youtube.
Heavy metal band Mötley Crüe once had a chicken thrown at them during a concert from their "Theatre of Pain" tour in 1985.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
The Mötley Crüe members might have accidentally been the cause of this though, per a video of the incident that was uploaded onto Youtube.
As the clip showed, the performance was going on as normal when a live chicken randomly appeared on stage. To get rid of it, one of the members grabbed the chicken and tossed it into the wild crowd — who threw it right back.
It is unclear if the chicken died in the process, although the video title suggests that it did.
And, most famously: Ozzy Osbourne once bit off the head of a live bat that was thrown at him while he was on stage.
Jamie McCarthy/WireImage
In 1982, while playing a gig on his "Diary of a Madman" tour, Prince of Darkness Ozzy Osbourne accidentally chomped on the head of a bat that a fan had tossed onstage, thinking it was made of rubber.
"Immediately, though, something felt wrong. Very wrong. For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid, with the worst aftertaste you could ever imagine," Osbourne wrote in his memoir, as reported in the The Washington Post.
"I could feel it staining my teeth and running down my chin. Then the head in my mouth twitched..." he wrote. "I didn't just go and eat a . . . bat, did I?"
Throwing things onstage is nothing new, and it doesn't look like it will stop.